Raspberry and vanilla custard pie

This recipe is kind of a mixture of recipes and ideas. Mommy likes fruit cakes and likes custard. So what else would be more ideal than this specific pie for her birthday?!

I think though the size of the pie dish I used was probably far too small. I used a 26cm dish and had some of the dough left for an additional little pie dish. So maybe a 28-29cm would have been somewhat more ideal?
I actually used 600gr raspberries, but I actually did not have enough space in my dish so I used it for the small dish, too.

Ingredients

600gr raspberries
6 tablespoons caster sugar
1 tablespoon potato starch
1 portion Sweet pie dough
1 portion Baking vanilla custard

Raspberries for decoration

Instructions

Mix the raspberries with the sugar and the potato starch.
Put the sweet pie dough in a pie dish of about 28cm.
Add some of the baking vanilla custard in the bottom of the dish over the dough.
Add the raspberry mixture.
Fill the dish with the rest of the custard.
Bake at 220 degrees Celsius without fan. I did bake it with ventilation and I burnt the shit... :(
After 20-25 minutes, the pie should be done.
 

Baking vanilla custard

This custard is meant to be used in pies and should be baked with the pie. It is not meant as vanilla custard to be eaten as is.

Ingredients

300gr milk (1,5% fat)

180gr cream (40% fat)

240gr caster sugar

145gr egg yolks

30gr potato starch

Instructions

Mix sugar and starch with egg yolks. Whip it until well mixed.

In the meantime, cook up the mixture of milk and cream. When it cooks up, take it off the heat, put in the egg and sugar mixture, cook up again and whisk together. Remove from heat.

Sweet pie dough

This is a recipe for pie dough. The recipe is originally French, but the Italians do use a similar recipe for doing a pie called "crostata".

Ingredients

250gr flour
125gr butter
75gr sugar
1 pinch of salt
1 egg

Instructions

Mix flour, sugar, salt and butter together until you get a sandy mixture. Add the egg and mix until you get a dough. Put it in a plastic bag for food and distribute the dough so it gets thin. It will cool down quicker.
After half an hour, take out the dough from the frigde and mix it again with your hands to get an elastic consistence. At this point you can use for your pies.

Note! I have had the less smart idea to make it a little sweeter by adding some additional sugar. Bad idea. The pie gets more crunchy and the taste is less enjoyable.

Brownies

I found a good brownie recipe. I used this recipe when baking a cake. Actually, I then reduced the amount of sugar, as the rest of the cake was so sweet. But maybe it was not necessary?! Still unsure.
Remember though. If you want to make a cake out of it, you need to be on the clear side that it is not really easy to keep it "whole". The brownie seems to have a tendency to go into pieces, really. Next time, I think I will do a caramel whip and make a cake out of it that I freeze. Then I will decorate it with caramel sauce.

Ingredients

175gr unsalted butter
225 gr dark chocolate
180gr caster sugar
3 medium eggs (separated)
65gr plain flour
50gr chopped pecan nuts

Instructions

Heat the oven to 180degrees Celsius.

Use a pan of 20cm to 26cm. If you do it in the smaller pan, it will be a more chubby and soft cake. So after I have tried the large pan, I do recommend the small one... ;)
Butter the pan and cover it with a baking sheet. It will make it much easier to get the brownie out of the cake.

Melt the butter. Add the sugar and wait until it has melted. Add 175gr chocolate and melt it in the mixture. Cool down the mixture.
Mix in the egg yolks. Add the flour. Also break the chocolate into small pieces and add it to the mixture together with the nuts.
Whip the egg whites. Mix some of the whipped egg whites in the chocolate mixture so that it gets somewhat fluffy and somewhat easier to mix with the egg whites. Then put the chocolate mixture in the bowl with the whipped egg whites and mix them together lightly so you do not loose the air in the whites.

Dough after adding the egg whites 2013-10-19

Bake for about 35-40 minutes until the top is crusty. I think if you are using the 26cm pan, you can actually have to take it out already after 30-35 minutes.

Baked brownie in the pan covered with baking paper 2013-10-19

You can freeze the brownie and it will still taste good afterwards. I have only eaten it cold, but it is supposed to be good warm with ice cream, too.
It gets a really funny bubbly surface... See... :)

Bubbly surface of the brownie cake 2013-10-19

Basic yellow cake

I have actually used this cake recipe nearly every time I actually have baked a cake in the last years. I think it works. And it tastes good, too. If you ask me...
I normally pick it down from the wilton.com home page, but every single time I wonder: "Do I have it among my recipes?", then, of course, I don't find it and at the end of the story I find myself fighting with American measures... So now, now let us do something against this...

Ingredients

375gr sifted flour

2 1/2 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp salt

390gr sugar

75gr butter

2 eggs

1 1/2 tsp vanilla

300gr milk

Instructions

Preheat oven to 175degrees Celsius. Grease bottom and walls of a pan (26cm diameter) or two (20cm diameter). Line with baking paper.
Sift flour, salt and baking powder and set it aside.
Cream sugar and butter until light and fluffy.

19/10-2013 Butter and sugar when fluffy...

Add one egg at the time and then add the vanilla and keep beating the mixture. I think it is smart not to add too cold eggs. It mixes much better.

19/10-2013 After having added the eggs

Add milk and the flour mixture alternatively until everything is incorporated. When this is the case, just beat one more minute.

19/10-2013 With flour and milk added

Then the batter is ready to be distributed into the pan(s).
I personally try to use special ribbons wetted with water to cover the external part of the pan so that the cake does not blow up in the middle. It is always good if it can stay flat at the top rather than getting bumps.
Bake for 30-35 minutes when in the small pans and 45-48 minutes when in the large one.

The cake is ideal for decorating. It can be prepared in advance and frozen as it is! When you need to set the cake, you can actually do it before it is completely defrosted as it will be easier to decorate when it is a little frozen.

Raspberry and white chocolate cheesecake

I love cheesecake and I love raspberries. But most of all, I love white chocolate. So the idea came over me today when I had some friends for dinner!
I found a recipe that I could not follow as I did not have the ingredients. So I used cream instead of sour cream... That did not go home well... What happened was that when I mixed together the white chocolate with the cream and I poured onto the cake, the fluid cream simply "broke into the cake" and disappeared somewhere in some cake cracks rather than keeping on the top. Not really how I intended it.... :) Again... Furthermore, when serving the cake, the fluid kept drooling off the cake. But well... let us not complain. It might have been a little weird but it did taste good! And the taste of white chocolate did go through the whole cake in some weird way... :) So not sure what to recommend: "follow the original recipe", "make something like the new one but in another order", or just go wild again?! Unsure!

Ingredients

Crust
250gr digestive cookies (note use Göteborgs Original version if you live in Sweden. The McVities do not give any good tasting crust if you ask me)
150gr butter

Original filling
400gr cream cheese
2 eggs
160gr sugar (2dl)
1 lemon zest

3dl raspberries (I actually just used frozen ones....)

3dl creme fraiche
100gr white chocolate

My own variation of the filling
400gr cream cheese
2 eggs
140gr sugar
1 lemon zest (I mostly forget but it works anyway)
140gr white chocolate
frozen raspberries

Instructions

Crush cookies. Melt butter. Mix together. Remember not to heat the butter too much otherwise the crust will be liquid and not good for baking.

Put in a springform pan. It is highly recommended to use baking paper to cover the pan.Make sure to cover the bottom of the pan but also the walls.
Bake in oven at 175degrees for 7 minutes

Original recipe
Mix Philadelphia, eggs, 135gr sugar and zest until smooth. Put in pan, sprinkle with raspberries, cover them and bake 30 more minutes.

Melt chocolate and mix in creme fraiche and remaining sugar. Put on cake also and bake 6 more minutes.

First variation
I actually used the same amount of cream instead. I melted the cream and let the chocolate melt. As I said, this approach seemed a little weird but it did taste good anyway. It is though not recommended to anybody that wants a practical cake to carry around: as you probably saw from the introduction, the cream never became thick and actually dropped around the cake even when cold...

My own variation of the filling
Mix eggs and all sugar and the zest if you remember.
Add Philadelphia and mix until smooth.
Melt the white chocolate. Add some of the mixture to it a little at the time. Mix quickly so the chocolate does not become hard. Add some more of the mixture. When the risk for the white chocolate to become hard while doing it, poor the chocolate mix in the rest of the mixture and stir until fully blended.

Put the raspberries in the crust and add the mixture. Bake for 30-35 minutes.

Decoration
I think decorating with some raspberries and some white chocolate shavings recalls the ingredients and looks pretty neat!

Torta paradiso

The original recipe seems to be from Lombardy, Italy, where I actually come from. I found the recipe on a book I got from my parents that is focusing on Lombardy food.

Torta paradiso 2013-02-16

Talked to my Mom on the phone that spoke about having baked it for Valentine's and my "dinner plans" just materialized. Had butter at home as I have been thinking of baking another Lombardian recipe called "Cremonesi" but as I do not have any malt at home, I decided to wait until I could get fetch of it first. So butter needs to be used in other contexts..

Slice of torta paradiso 2013-02-16

As I know the more cake I bake the more I eat, I decided to do half the recipe. The original recipe is actually based on potato starch and not corn starch... But, hey, you take what you have at home...

And, of course, before shaking it out of the pan, it needs cooling. But desperation and hunger does not really always allow for patience... So if you wonder why it looks mistreated, then guess how hungry I was when I pulled it out of the oven... ;)

Ingredients
115gr butter
115gr sugar
60gr flour
60gr corn starch (original recipe calls for potato starch actually...)
1 egg
2 egg yolks
salt
vanilla powder

Instructions
I whipped the butter until soft with the sugar. Original recipe does not contemplate whipping but only mixing butter soft and then adding the sugar. I kept whipping in the one egg first and then each egg yolk at the time. No whipping is implied in the original recipe, only mixing together slowly. Add the flours and mix. Add salt and vanilla powder at the end.
I baked it at 200 degrees for about 20 minutes but the original recipe says 180 degrees for 35 minutes. I changed it as the quantity was halved.
Put the mixture in a buttered spring form
When done, remove from the pan

I personally felt it turned out dry. Could though be due to the fact that the eggs were too small.

So let us recap for next time:
- Use big eggs
- Use either smaller pot or do full size
- Use the 180 degrees oven temperature
- Use potato starch and not corn starch
Not sure these were the errors but we have to start from somewhere?!

The best Nutella muffins ever....

My friend Rebecca has been baking very good Nutella muffins for a long time I think. But one day, she found out she needed them to be egg and milk free. At the end of the story she found this wonderful recipe.

I have not baked them myself yet, but I have definitively eaten them and I could also have eaten more (not without consequences though... :O) ). But she does say that they were very easy to make and also resulted in a dough that also was easy to handle.

The best Nutella muffins

Ingredients
3dl (180gr) flour 
2dl (170gr) sugar
1dl cocoa

1 teaspoon bicarbonate
1 pinch of salt
2 1/2dl hot water
1dl oil
1 teaspoon vinegar
Nutella

Instructions
Turn on the oven to 225degrees.
Mix all dry ingredients. Add all fluid ingredients and mix. Put some of the dough in the forms and then put in Nutella. Cover with more dough.
Bake in the middle of the oven for about 12-15 minutes.

One thing though to remember for future usage: The small guys can be little sticky so it might be a good idea to use paper forms when baking them. They will not need to "break" while trying to take them out of the pan.

Janne's birthday cake

Janne's birthday, this year again, and here is my (only?!) chance to bake a cake.
This time I wanted to have sugar paste to cover the cake, and I wanted to do sugar paste myself instead of purchasing it ready-made. Found a good recipe from a very trustworthy source of recipes, Bakglädje, which I personally highly recommend as it is an infinite source of tasteful stuff (ok, maybe not really infinite, but very tasteful indeed).

So this was the result from my baking activity:

From the far, the sugarpaste looks normal, but on a nearer look, it was rather "crumbled" and did not look very good.

This was probably due to the fact that I was not able to follow the recipe due to missing ingredients. Also the coloring was a real tough task. The color did not look near what I was aiming at. I wanted to have a "sun-orange" and a "orange-red" color but it rather turned into a "carrot orange" color and a "orange-pink" one. The green was not leave green either directly. What to do what to do... :O)

Anyway, I actually think the 3D-idea was rather neat, even though the implementation was as doubtful as usual.

As Janne is a real chocoholic, I decided to give in and make him a chocolate cake for once...
I personally love to fill the cake with fruit rather than only going for the classical mousse. I personally think it tastes healthier, but the "stability" of the cake is not top notch. Or maybe again, it is something I do wrong. But I think it was stable enough. In order to make the cake more stable even though it contains fruit, I normally put a string of icing, white chocolate chip icing to be specific, on the border of the cake for each layer and fill it with the wished fruit. Here, I used sliced bananas for the first layer and sliced strawberries for the second one.

I decided to complete the layers with a thin layer of white chocolate fluff at the top of each layer.
Unfortunately, the chocolate cake was so friable, it looked rather messy when sliced, but it did taste rather good anyways! And my little goldilocks seemed to appreciate anyways... :O)

Chocolate cake...

This recipe originates from the wilton.com recipe collection. In my opinion, the guys have normally very good recipes. In this specific case, there was nothing wrong with the taste in itself (especially when licking the batter off the bowl), but I personally think the baked cake was very friable.
This is how it looked:

which obviously made me very happy I intended to decorate it rather than serving it as is...
This is anyway the "original" recipe halved if you want to make smaller cakes. But if you want a whole batter, double up.

Ingredients

85gr butter
1 cups dark chocolate chips
170gr sugar
2 small eggs
1 tsp vanilla extract
140gr all-purpose flour
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp salt
1,75dl water

Instructions
Preheat oven to 350°F. Spray pan with vegetable pan spray. Melt 1/2 cup chocolate chips and butter together either in microwave oven or on top of range over low heat. Stir until chocolate is completely melted. Pour into electric mixer bowl. Add sugar; beat until well blended. Beat in eggs, one at time. Add vanilla. Stir in 1/2 cup flour, baking soda and salt; mix well. Add remaining flour and water; mix until smooth. Pour into prepared pan. Bake 40-45 minutes or until cake tests done. Place pan on cooling rack. Sprinkle remaining 1/2 cup chocolate chips over cake; let stand 2-3 minutes or until chips have softened. Gently spread melted chocolate over top of cake. Cool completely in pan before covering.

Personally, I was not very impressed by the idea of melting the chocolate chips at the top of the cake. The result was a very friable top cover. In the filled cake it just gave a crunchy texture. Both of these points I could really as well have lived without.

Rhubarb cake with white chocolate chips

A little background

Now, after a few years, we dare picking a few stems from our rhubarb plants. Janne is responsible for baking this time! He found a recipe on the internet and modified to skip spices we do not like and added more rhubarb just to keep up the health factor (or was it as we happened to have three stems in the fridge?!?).
However it was, it tasted very good and looked neat too. Viewed from the top:

And for your information this is the way it looked inside.

And yes, the missing part was eaten within a 5 minute period by two people only.... ;O)

Ingredients

2 eggs
160gr sugar
1 tsp vanilla sugar
2 tsp baking powder
180gr flour
1dl milk
125gr melted butter

3 rhubarb stems
50gr butter
40gr sugar

70gr white chocolate chips


Instructions

Grease a cake pan and dust it with flour.
In mixer bowl, cream eggs and sugar until light anf fluffy. On the side, mix vanilla sugar, baking powder and flour well. Add the flour mixture to the creamed mixture. Also add milk and melted butter beating well after each addition.
Spread batter evenly in the prepared pan.

Peel the rhubarb stems and cut them in 1cm pieces. Melt the butter in a pan and add the rhubarb. After 1-2 minutes add sugar and cook until rhubar is soft.

Distribute the white chocolate chips on the batter and distribute the rhubarb mixture over the cake.

Bake at 190 degrees for 35-40 minutes.

White Chocolate Chip Muffins

A little background

This recipe originates from a classical Swedish book called Sju sorters kakor where the original name of the cake was Muffins med Frukt (Muffins with fruit) and actually contained raisins and candied orange skins. Unfortunately, this recipe has been removed from their latest edition, so this is for all of you that have been deprived by this wonderful recipe and purchased your book too late. Or even never have had the chanse to own one at all. 

The white chocolate chips will kind of disappear in the muffin, but the taste will be much better than for the regular batter without them.

If you want to feel the taste of the white chocolate chips, you might want to put some few additional chips in the middle of the muffin. You might as well decide to fill it with milk chocolate or even Nutella. I am not a fan of chocolate (you read right!!!), but these small guys are real killers!!! Difficult to stop.

You can freeze them if you desire or even cover them with cream cheese frosting. For a lighter version, see Everyday cream cheese frosting.


This is how it looked like with frosting. I personally always make very small cupcakes, so I can eat them in a few bites and the frosting to muffin ratio becomes somewhat higher. :O) Only problem is you need more than one small muffin plate to use up the whole batter... But well... What you do not do to get the right size... Hehe...

Ingredients

125 gr butter

170 gr sugar

2 eggs

1 tsp vanilla sugar

270 gr flour

2 tsp baking powder

1,5 dl milk

2 dl white Chocolate chips

Instructions

Turn on the oven at 200 (180) degrees (with ventilation)

Butter muffin pans in advance so they are ready when the cake mixture is.

In mixer bowl, cream butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add eggs one at a time, mixing well after each addition. Mix in vanilla sugar. Mix flour with baking powder. Add flour mixture alternately with milk, starting with the flour; mix well but slowly. Add the white chocolate chips. Pour into muffin pans.

Make sure that the chocolate chips do not surface as they will kind of burn otherwise.